One of the funniest royal stories last week was the “Reddit investigation” into the Duchess of Sussex’s As Ever inventory. Basically, there was a minor technical glitch on As Ever’s site which allowed people to see how much product is in stock, down to single units of jam, tea, honey, etc. At first, Meghan’s biggest haters tried to argue that “it’s bad for a business to have items in stock.” Then the British media started doing the math and, by their accounting, they estimate that Meghan has probably already sold close to a million units of jam. Long story short, the haters proved that Meghan is likely raking in millions of dollars from jam sales alone. What started out as an exercise in derangement became a hilariously positive story of a small business’s massive success over the course of one year of operation. Well, obviously, British commentators are now huffing and puffing about how Meghan’s jam sales show that “society is broken.” From William Sitwell’s Telegraph column, “When Meghan can make £27m selling jam, you know society is broken.”
At $42 (£31) a box, it meant [Meghan had] made £26.7m worth of sales on the jam alone. It is a quite astonishing achievement and, for students of business, sets out a very clear and specific path of how to win at being an entrepreneur in the 2020s.
That is, have an absolutely razor-sharp vision of how to become famous and powerful and enact the plan via a blog, TV game shows, a snazzy Netflix drama, snagging a prince and positioning yourself as a helpless princess in a realm of beastly and backward strictures and rigmarole. Then, flee that house of racism and colonial brutality, move to LA, publicise your private agonies in documentaries and drawn-out interviews – painting yourself as an unfairly maligned Messiah-like icon – and, finally, star in a syrupy TV homecraft series before flogging jam.
The nation’s WI circles will be scratching their heads, of course. These ladies have been making jam for decades, selling their wares at fetes and in village halls, stymied, latterly, by regulations and battered by cost margins. Then a usurper emerges, some sort of princess no less, who bags muzzles, kidnaps and brainwashes our (formerly) most favourite royal, takes the preserve idea and makes not just a million quid, but 27 of them.
As an entrepreneur – one who is well accustomed with feverishly surveying spreadsheets owing to my recently procured hotel, bar and restaurant – I must bow down and congratulate her royal jamminess.
But we all know that there is actually something very, horribly, agonisingly, disturbingly wrong about this. And I do not approach this as some naïve socialist complaining that a man down a pit must chop away at a coalface for a pittance while a metropolitan banker can make a squillion with a few phone calls and judicious taps on a computer screen before calling it quits and repairing for a nice lunch.
No, it’s worse than that. Society is surely going wrong, fracturing to pieces, when an influencer of Meghan’s kind, a creature perfectly cast for the modern age, can persuade hundreds of thousands of people to part with their hard-earned money for this type of product. Not due to the provenance of its ingredients, its glorious fruity texture, deft uses of pectin or perfect structural set, but because the person who sells it is famous. Who are these slobbering, genuflecting, media-message munching, gladly and willingly indoctrinated toadies buying Meghan’s signature fruit spread at the expense of a local jam with a deeper story and more earthy, simpler provenance?
While many talk of the importance of small-time producers – of the fruits of the labour of those who endure a daily grind, hammered by tax and red tape – the reality, as shown by Meghan’s 27-million large ones, is that society is now nothing but a hollow vessel of vanity worshippers.
So he’s mad that Meghan has talked about – and profited from! – her royal jail sentence, but then he’s also mad that she’s simply running a profitable and successful business which has nothing to do with her royal connections? Therein lies the rub for these lunatics, and this has been their problem since the start of Meghan’s jam enterprise. They’ve justified their obsession with Meghan for years as “well, she’s talking about OUR royals, she’s married to OUR prince, she still belongs to US!” But As Ever has nothing to do with the Windsors or the British press or anything else. This was always her path before she even met Harry – she created lifestyle content, and she wanted a lifestyle brand or food-related brand. They can’t “claim” it in any way and it’s driving them crazy.
Sitwell’s bigger problem is that Meghan is a good businesswoman who makes a good product and there’s a large customer base willing to pay for her product. Which means that his problem is with capitalism itself. Comrade Deranger is literally throwing a tantrum about an American business being sold solely within the American market. Meanwhile, Meghan is far from the only celebrity or influencer with a successful brand, but he seems to only have a problem with Meghan, or as he calls her, “a creature perfectly cast for the modern age.” These people are never beating the dehumanizing/racist allegations.
Photos courtesy of Netflix, As Ever’s Instagram.
